Emergency

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ABSTRACT: In early September of 1973, the narrator is working as a night clerk in a hospital emergency room in the Midwest. He shares drugs that are stolen by his friend Georgie, an orderly. Georgie hallucinates that there is a pool of blood on the floor of O.R., which he mops ceaselessly. At around 3:30 a.m., a man named Terrence Weber walks in with a hunting knife stuck in his eye. Weber's other eye is false. He says that his wife stabbed him. The doctor on duty calls in a team of specialists to pull out the knife, but while they deliberate on what to do, Georgie pulls out the knife. Weber is undamaged. Georgie and the narrator get stoned and drive to the county fair. On the way back, Georgie runs over a rabbit. He guts it with Weber's knife, and finds eight living babies in the womb. He hands them to the narrator, who accidentally sits on them. An unseasonal blizzard descends upon them, and they get lost. They see a drive-in movie screen in the distance, which the narrator mistakes for an angelic visitation. The next morning, they pick up a hitchhiker named Hardee, a boy the narrator knows. He tells them that he's been drafted, and gone AWOL Georgie promises to get him to Canada. When Hardee asks Georgie what he does for a job, he says, “I save lives.”